Individual and National Rights in the Torah

By Moshe Feiglin

Illustration: Temple Institute

Take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers' houses, according to the number of names, every male, by their polls; From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel: you shall number them by their hosts, you and Aaron. (From this week's Torah portion, Bamidbar, Numbers 1:2-3)

The ultimate purpose of the journey of the Israelites in the desert was the establishment of a kingdom of priests - a nation that testifies to the existence of the Creator and expresses His will in His world. To this end, the entire book of Leviticus delineates how to conduct ourselves as a holy nation that will enter the Holy Land and establish G-d's royal palace in the holy city on the holy mountain and crown the Creator of the world as King.

The Torah teaches us how to build G-d's royal palace, dictates its measurements and how to attend to it, how to build the Land and how to live in it. It tells us how the Nation of Israel should relate to its Land and how it should relate to itself. The entire treatise on proper conduct for a kingdom of priests and a holy nation ends with positive reinforcement for doing the job right - and alarming threats for failure to live up to the Torah directives.

After this introduction, the Torah opens the Book of Numbers with a census. Why a census? We are about to establish a kingdom of priests - we have the perfection of the world weighing on our shoulders - why do we need to count the individuals? With such lofty goals on our sights, what difference does it make exactly how many people are in each tribe and each family?

The 20th century era of revolutions catapulted the world between ideologies that erased the individual and those that erased the nation; between socialism and capitalism; fascism and democracy.

The Torah, however, includes both contradicting worldviews. The Land of Israel belongs to the Nation of Israel as a nation. But it also belongs to each individual. The state should not erase the individual as it did in Gush Katif, and the individual should not erase the state - even if that individual happens to be the prime minister.